


Curriculum Vitae

by Kat_C_Lyon



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Daredevil (TV) Spoilers, Drunkenness, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 09:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6369982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kat_C_Lyon/pseuds/Kat_C_Lyon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The wine goes down far too easily, which helps, because the numbers on the spreadsheet are harder for Claire to swallow. She’ll burn through her savings in a couple of months. Fantastic.</i>
</p>
<p>Claire gets drunk and updates her resume.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Curriculum Vitae

Claire buys a bottle of tequila on her way home.  
  
Then she thinks better of it and stops again for wine, because she is an adult, damn it, and she might not have a shift tonight, but she’s still got shit to do. Shit like make a new budget that almost certainly won’t have room in it for two bottles of alcohol in a day. Well, sometimes you have an edge to take off, and it’s still cheaper than Ativan.  
  
Her latest apartment, her third in less than a year, is cramped, and cold. After having a stable address she actually liked for five years, after being a model tenant, after getting kicked out for Causing A Disturbance. This one is not as outrageously overpriced as the first apartment she managed to find, but it’s close. You take what you can get when you’re all out of references.  
  
Claire wraps herself in a blanket, pours her first generous glass of wine (“red”, the bottle says, helpfully), and fires up her clunky old laptop. Her hard drive is whirring again, and she knows that’s a bad sign. She’s backed up the really important stuff, she keeps meaning to replace the whole thing, but she’ll have to put that off again for a while. The upside is, in this neighbourhood, it’s as much theft prevention as anything else.  
  
The wine goes down far too easily, which helps, because the numbers on the spreadsheet are harder for Claire to swallow. Without anything new coming in, with her rent as high as it is, with a food budget that allows for something real once in a while and an entertainment budget that allows for… Netflix, maybe? She’ll burn through her savings in a couple of months. Fantastic.  
  
So, taking the opportunity of the time off to finally get that masters is probably not in the cards. When once upon a time, Claire had all but convinced the hospital brass to help pay for the degree. But that was before. Before she started going off the rails. Before the rumours started flying behind her back. Before she found out what kind of people she was working for. No chance they’d have offered her money after that, and now, no chance she’d take it.  
  
Grad school, and the laptop, are definitely going to have to wait, then, while updating her resume rockets to the top of the priority list. She pours another glass.  
  
It’s been almost ten years since Claire has needed to do this, and she needs to sit with that for a minute. Ten damn years. She’s kept her resume current, more or less, there are other reasons to need a resume, like the masters she’ll never get. But the out-of-date details start right in her contact info. It’s from two addresses and one phone number ago. It's from _before._  
  
Maybe she should just go ahead and put her mom’s address on it. At least that’s stable. It’s someone who can always reach her. Uptown, but that might be more attractive to employers right now than the shitshow that is Hell’s Kitchen. It’s probably where Claire is going to end up living if she doesn’t turn this job thing around, like, tomorrow. And isn’t that the fucking kicker. Claire moved out of her parents’ place when she started college, lived alone since her first steady paycheque, and she’s never looked back. Ever. She needs her own space, her own routines, her own stuff. She loves her mother fiercely, of course, but nothing seems to kill a good relationship with Claire as quickly as an attempt at co-habitation.  
  
The job thing is not going to turn around tomorrow. Nor, probably, in the next couple of months. She didn’t ask for a reference on her way out, and she got the message, loud and clear, that that bridge is now ash on the water. She might have some leverage left, “Stellar reference or I’ll talk,” but she has never been a good bluffer, and they have to know she’s going to talk, no matter what. If she was willing to keep her mouth shut, she’d still have a job. So as it stands, she has no tenant references, no work references, but needs a new place and a new job. Again, fantastic.  
  
Would she have gotten a work reference, though? Claire wasn’t stupid, she didn’t miss the rumours. She was good, but she'd become erratic. A loose cannon. One day she was solid and dependable, and the next she was dropping shifts, going off-call without warning. Ask her to feed your cat and she trashes the place. And loses the cat. These were signs her co-workers were trained to recognize. She was trained to recognize. They were never going to let them pass without painting themselves a neat little picture.  
  
Addiction seemed to be the winning diagnosis. Abusive relationship was a strong second, when you added in the mysterious “car crash” injuries. She couldn’t prove it, but part of Claire suspected that the shift from hell was as much to keep her where concerned eyes could see her as it was to punish her. They weren’t even that far off, but they got the words in the wrong order. Nobody guessed a relationship with an addict who abuses himself.  
  
They have more of the real picture to work from, now. She could probably tell some version of the truth. And it wouldn’t really make a difference, would it?  
  
The education section hasn’t changed much. A BS in nursing with a concurrent diploma in emergency medicine. As much professional development and continuing education as she could squeeze in. Since the last time she looked at this, she’s taken one more course. In addiction treatment, coincidentally. If she were taking it now, she’d use Matt as a case study. The guy is waving more red flags than a bloody North Korean May Day parade. She made herself available, like she’s supposed to, reached out, like she’s supposed to, and he shut her out. Again. So, that is his problem. _His problem,_ she repeats to herself, trying to make herself believe it. This soft spot is, without even a hint of exaggeration, going to kill her.  
  
_Her_ problem is currently staring at her from a backlit, white screen. Her head is starting to cloud, fingertips are going numb. Maybe she’s not in the best state to do this, but now she’s started. Work experience really hasn’t changed, except she has to replace the word “present” with an actual date. Past. Final. Claire drains her glass. The next glass drains the bottle.  
  
The special skills section probably looked impressive, before. Now, it's just weak. Boring. Claire stretches her arms and cracks a few joints. Takes a big pull from her glass. She can do better.  
  
Emergency surgery with a kitchen knife on a living room floor. She deletes that and writes in: _Field medicine._ It’s hilarious, for some reason.  
  
Kidnapping won’t fly with potential employers, but maybe _Arranging flexible home-care._  
Dressing gunshot wounds over the phone? Try _Remote emergency response._  
  
Claire laughs harder. She’s definitely on a roll, here.  
  
Draining excess CSF through an eye socket with a long needle. _Innovations in medical technology._  
Hand to hand combat with baseball bats and IV poles. _Hands-on patient advocacy._  
  
And then, there are the hobbies:

Skydiving. No, that’s not it. _BASE jumping_.  
Torture. _Whittling._  
  
Now Claire is laughing so hard, tears squeeze out of the corners of her eyes. The really hilarious part is how she just flushed the last ten years of her life down the toilet. And fucked up the last thing she was supposed to do. (It’s less laughing and more sobbing, now.) The system she believed in is as corrupt as every other. The co-worker she roped in is dead. Another friend, the one she's thrown everything away for, is slowly killing himself, no, careening full-tilt towards self-destruction, and he won’t take the help she's offering. Zombies are real.  
  
She has to move back in with her mother.  
  
She presses her hands to her eyes until it hurts, but the tears aren't going to stop. She's invested ten years, plus five for school, answered every call, kicked ass at work, invented medical procedures, missed more sleep than she’s gotten, saved more than one life with nothing, and even laid down her own life a couple times, and what has that gotten her? What the hell does Claire even have left to show for it? Not even a goddamn, son-of-a-bitching sip of wine, for a start, and she cries even harder at the pathetic little trickle that comes out of the bottle. Sucks in air, sucks back snot and spit and throws the empty bottle down, weakly enough that it only makes a little dent in the already shitted-up floor and rolls away. She just stops herself from throwing the glass, too. Can’t break the glass, needs it. For the tequila. Wine is for amateurs. Fuck wine.

 

* * *

  
  
The hangover is brutal. Claire is aware of that before anything else. She's achy, and nauseous, and wrung out, and she's barely even opened her eyes, yet. The mattress under her head is still damp. She can’t remember much, but she apparently had the presence of mind to arrange herself into the recovery position as she was passing out. The forethought to separate her face and her laptop so she wouldn’t drool or cry or throw up on it, and it lives to whirr and click another day. She didn’t close it, though, and when her hand brushes the trackpad, it wakes up and glares into her aching eyes. She squints, and adjusts, and the bullshit she slung around last night is staring her in the face. Claire groans. It’s worse than she remembered.  
  
And then she sits up, panicked enough to endure the spinning head. She didn’t actually send this sloppy piece of shit out to anyone, did she? There's nothing in her email outbox, thank god, but she did start writing a cover letter. She deletes that without looking at it, doesn't need that embarrassment right now. And then she closes the laptop to deal with later. Right now, she needs a shower, and about a gallon of water, and to eat some fried eggs, or something.  
  
She passes the tequila bottle on her way to the bathroom. It’s a relief in one way, a disappointment in another. She didn’t drink as much as she’d feared, but she can’t hold nearly as much as she once could.  
  
She lets the shower blast away her dried up tears and drool, lets the steam open her pores and maybe suck the alcohol out faster (nah, it doesn’t work like that, be nice if it did). She lets the feeling of the water hitting her in the face lift her brain fog a little. She has some thinking to do.  
  
First of all, Claire isn’t mad at Matt for his part in all of this. She can’t be. He found a bunch of mostly-dead kids and got them help, and she can’t fault him for doing that, whatever the consequences. He didn’t actually lose her her job, or get anyone killed. Other people did those things. She’s still mad at him, for deciding to be such an asshole, and she’s scared, for him and even a little bit _of_ him, for once, but not for this.  
  
No, she’s glad she got out of that place, and maybe this whole thing is an opportunity. Not for more school- that wasn’t the alcohol talking, she really can’t afford it- but… That crap she wrote on her resume is true. It’s ridiculous, it borders on insane, but it also happens to be true, and it's only the beginning. Given that, is a hospital even the best place for her, anymore? Day after day of her three favourite crackheads, cleaning up after knife fights, counting fingers, and washing fluids out of her scrubs? Those unexplained absences, that unreliability, it wasn’t because she was getting high, or getting knocked around by some dick she was dating, it’s because she was saving lives. The lives who have needed Claire the most lately aren’t well served by hospitals. And on that level, neither is she. The hospital was just holding her back. But what’s the alternative? She doesn’t even know where to start.  
  
Except yes, she does. She knows exactly where to start. She’ll start by getting the hell back up. She’ll clean up that resume and go looking for people to take it, hospitals or no. She needs a new income _now_ , and she can always quit later when she’s sorted out the rest. Home care gigs sound tedious, but they’re no less necessary than emergency medicine, they’re always available, and they’ll keep her going. She’ll reach out to old co-workers, people who can recommend her without fear for their jobs. She’ll take this free time, and put it to use, and maybe get new references out of that. At a shelter, or an outreach clinic, or somewhere else that’s desperate for free pairs of trained hands. She’ll go see her mom, and get properly fed, and she'll give her the biggest damn hug.  
  
Claire wraps up her wet hair and starts making coffee.  
  
And when she’s had her coffee, and her aspirin, when the pounding in her head is just a little bit quieter, she makes another resume. This one is just for herself, just to lay it all out, see if anything comes into focus. Claire digs through her closet and finds a sharpie, and pulls two old posters from a roll she's been hanging on to. ( _Donnie Darko_? Jesus. It’s well past time for this poster to start earning its keep.) She turns them around, white side out, and tacks them to the wall.  
  
On one, she writes across the top: _Things I Can Do_  
  
And on the other: _Things I Can Survive_  
  
Those seem like as good a starting place as any.


End file.
